


My Words Will Be Your Light

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 3x09 spoilers, F/M, Fluff, Romantic Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2785712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Felicity Smoak is six years old, her father walks out the front door of their house. She sits at the window in her room, small fingers gripping the sill and sapphire eyes wide with vigilance, waiting for his blue truck to turn back around the corner. It never does, and Felicity experiences, for the first time, what it is to have her heart broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Words Will Be Your Light

**Author's Note:**

> Finals made me do it. Spoilers for 3x09. Title from "Winter Song" by Sara Bareilles & Ingrid Michaelson.

When Felicity Smoak is six years old, her father walks out the front door of their house. She sits at the window in her room, small fingers gripping the sill and sapphire eyes wide with vigilance, waiting for his blue truck to turn back around the corner. It never does, and Felicity experiences, for the first time, what it is to have her heart broken.

Her mom spends her time making up petty excuses and lies, trying to protect her precious little girl. Felicity spends her time under her Disney princess covers, screwing her eyes shut tight and trying to remember the contours of his face, the timbre of his voice, the chime of his laugh when he tickled her mercilessly. Her mom tells her that if her father could be with her, he would be. Felicity doesn’t believe it for a minute.

Her heart, so small and lively beneath her chest, learns to adjust itself accordingly.

By some agonizing, ironic fate of the universe, her talent is computer science. She can pinpoint the location of a micro-chipped squirrel in less than twenty seconds. She is an expert at finding people who do not want to be found. It is her hobby, her career, her true love.

Her dad is out there, somewhere in the world—of course she wonders where. Once, when she’s seventeen, she spends three months creating a program that can search for people faster than the CIA can put them on its most wanted list. When she’s done, she types the letters of his name into the search bar. This is her purpose—the crowning moment for which she’s been waiting. But at the last second, before the search can turn up, she panics. Grabbing her coffee, she pours it over the keyboard, watching the monitor sizzle and flicker and die.

She learns that she will always have the genius to find him, and he will never want to be found. Her father does not love her enough to stay with her; that is fact—a truth Felicity can accept.

The loss of her father is maneuverable, survivable.

The loss of Oliver Queen is not.

He is gone for three months and seven days and during that time Felicity is trapped in her own personal hell.

She wishes she could say that her life does not depend on Oliver Queen, that her world does not fade from color and she keeps from spiraling into near insanity in his absence. But Digg can tell you about the nights she sleeps on his couch and wakes up screaming from nightmares. Roy can reluctantly detail the afternoons he finds her tucked into a corner of Verdant, a tumbler held between her small hands and her eyes numb and vacant.

Oliver Queen leaves a ghost behind when he dies, and it is Felicity Smoak. He is not her father—she cannot find Oliver; he does not have the capacity to be found. When it mattered, she had mustered the strength to choose herself over him. But she would never, not in a million years, choose a life without him.

When she comes out of it alive—when _he_ comes out of it alive—things are not happy and new and whole. Her heart is bloodied, battered and raw, and it is not a feeling she will soon forget—a feeling of loss and abandonment, of hopelessness and despair so acute that for the first time in her life, her morality of happiness had failed her.

So the world does not stop turning with Oliver’s return. Her nightmares do not magically disappear. The clench in her gut whenever he is out of her sight does not loosen. She is broken and damaged and it is not something for which he can be faulted, but it is also not something he can fix.

She tries to keep it from him, but he is more reliant on her than ever. Her efforts to keep him in her sight are nothing compared to his efforts to keep her in his. Naturally, he notices the manic look in her eyes, the unfamiliar stoicism in her expressions, the deadened tone of her voice. She is more resolute in her decisions—a fierce confidence that trips him up; she no longer tolerates any degree of carelessness on his part.

Not that it helps much in keeping him alive.

He has been back for three weeks when she almost loses him again. It’s a mission gone wrong—nothing they haven’t experienced before—but reality is sharper when she can picture images of his body, broken and bloodied, at the base of a mountain.

He’s running recon on a location known to be the former headquarters for a local gang when the silence is suddenly filled with gunshots. His shouts come over her earpiece before his comm breaks into a mess of static and she’s incredibly certain that he’s gone again, not even a month after she got him back.

Her reaction is immediate this time—not the slow, dreadful realization when Nyssa had shown up at the foundry all those months ago. Now, tears are streaming down her face and she’s gasping for air, sobbing out his name with unmasked desperation. Two minutes later—one hundred and twenty _agonizing_ seconds later—the connection clears. He’s panting and his voice is thick with pain and the first thing he says is her name.

“Felicity,” he breaths, and she hiccups as wave after wave of relief crashes over her body. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.”

She can’t even bring herself to respond. Digg looks on warily as she rips out her earpiece and walks out of the foundry, arms clutching her stomach as if it’s being torn from her body.

When Oliver arrives, Roy in tow, his eyes search wildly for her. Instead, his gaze lands on Digg, and his friend’s expression is dour.

“You have no idea what it was like for her, man,” Diggle says quietly, a certain degree of severity in his voice, and Oliver knows he is not talking about the mission tonight. “You can’t…you have to be more careful. You’re the one who left—who died. She’s the one who had to suffer the aftermath.”

Oliver leaves without saying anything. So urgent is his need to reach her that he only strips himself of his hood, bow and quiver. He walks through Verdant in green leather pants and a black t-shirt and doesn’t give a single thought to anyone who might notice. All that matters is finding her.

She’s sitting in her car, parked in its usual spot towards the back corner of the underground garage. He can see her figure bent over through the driver’s side window. Her knuckles are gripping the wheel so tightly that the veins throbbing through the backs of her hands are starkly apparent against her pale skin. Her head is pitched forward and her body is wracked with broken, heaving sobs.

He opens the door without hesitation, finding it unlocked. She barely even flinches at the intrusion, and the vigilante inside of him tries not to think about what could have happened if someone else found her in an unlocked car while she was so senselessly unaware.

“Felicity,” he says, and she just shakes her head, her cries intensifying at the sound of his voice. His heart feels like it’s going to beat right out of his chest, it hurts so much to see her like this. The past few weeks haven’t been much better, a slow torture as he observes the dark circles under her eyes, the way she watches him almost every second he’s in her line of sight. She doesn’t accept even the slightest moment of silence over the comms, always keeping him talking. And when he’s in a situation where talking could compromise his position, he can feel her nervous energy through their connection at the prolonged silence between them.

He wants so badly to comfort her that he can’t help himself from reaching out. He kneels down next to her seat and stretches around her waist to unbuckle her seatbelt. Slowly, slowly, he wraps one arm around her back and threads the other beneath her knees, dragging her out of the car. She curls into him instantly, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around his neck.

His neck dampens as she cries into his collarbone and he has never hated himself more than in this moment, the cause of her pain. He doesn’t know how to balance it, making her happy and protecting her from harm. But this—this can’t go on. There has to be a breaking point, and watching Felicity collapse into his arms after thinking he died is it. The rest can be sorted out later.

For now, he sits with her, rocking back on his heels until he’s leaning against the concrete wall of the parking garage. He runs his fingers through her hair, whispering soothingly in her ear and trying his best to hold her together as she falls apart.

x-x-x

Officially or not, they’re together after that. The rules are unstated but simple: unequivocal honesty and never sleeping alone. It’s a natural rhythm, and falling into it is easier than breathing with her soft smile and smooth skin to wake up to.

One day, she’s standing in his kitchen making breakfast—it’s the morning after the first night they spend at his place instead of hers, and Thea is so beside herself with excitement that she and her frantic energy have been banned from the kitchen. Oliver comes up behind Felicity, twirling her around with his hands on her waist and kissing her slow and soft in the morning light that streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

She hums against his lips, holding a rubber spatula with one hand and pressing her sticky, batter-coated fingers to his wrist with her other. She tastes like sunshine and chocolate chips and nothing in his life has ever made him feel like this, like happiness and love and _home._

When they break apart, his breathing is slow and measured, calm in a way he hasn’t experienced in years. She steadies him, and so he speaks the words he’s said before, basking in the simplicity of sleepy mornings with a woman who brightens the shadowy corners of his world.

“I love you,” he says, dropping his forehead down to hers and breathing in the scent of her skin, the glow of her presence.

She hums again. Nuzzling up to his neck, her nose skims from the corner of his jaw to his chin and her lips press a soft kiss there.

“I love you, too,” she says. There’s a gentle smile playing at her lips. Her hair is tumbling over her shoulders and her eyes are beautiful in the way they shine up at him. Oliver feels a pleasant warmth swirl in his stomach because she’s _happy._ She’s happy, and that’s really all he’s ever wanted.

x-x-x

His scar makes her breath freeze in her lungs, makes her heart stutter out an unsteady beat and every time she sees it, just for a moment, she feels like the life is being sapped from her body. This isn’t a battle wound; this isn’t a sign of endurance or a trophy for saving someone’s life. He had died—actually, physically _died_.

For the first twenty-five years of her life, before she saw liquid super strength packaged into a syringe and met Barry Allen, Felicity hadn’t believed in the impossible. Even when her mom had tried to convince her that her dad would come back— _“Tomorrow. Just one more day, sweetheart. You’ll see.”—_ Felicity had known better than to believe in improbabilities. Now, she owes Oliver Queen’s life to the impossible. He would not be here, with her, without it.

Sometimes, the thought of never having the chance to be with him, like they are now, paralyzes her.

“What happened to the maybes?” she asks quietly one afternoon when the soft haze of an early sunset filters in through her bedroom windows. He’s laying propped against her headboard, shirtless, and she’s sitting cross-legged beside him, her knees pressed into his rib cage and hip.

He looks up from where he’s scrolling through the tablet— _her_ tablet—and sees her gaze fixed on the streak of raised skin, pinker than the others, resting at the very top of his torso.

“What?” he asks, caught off-guard by the sunlight glinting off of her sapphire blue eyes and highlighting her cheekbones.

“The maybes,” she says again. “When did you decide that you could be with me—you know, no maybes?”

“You use my toothbrush every morning despite the fact that you know I hate it,” Oliver says. “Who said there are no maybes?”

She hits his torso and his laugh rumbles low in his chest when he catches her fingers between his. A smile pulls at his lips as he slides her hand up to cover his heart.

“Oliver, I’m being serious.”

He plays with her hand, stroking her skin softly and threading his fingers in and out of hers, looking at them contemplatively.

“I died,” he says, and even though she had prepared herself for this, she still feels the needling displeasure that tingles through her muscles. “I died and the last thought I had was of you.”

She knows this. He had whispered the words into her skin under the dark cover of a velvety night sky and they had anchored to her bones. But now, hearing it again, the tears still spring to her eyes.

She waits for him to continue, and he does. “Digg had told me when Sara died that if I wanted you to be happy, I would be with you. And I don’t—I don’t know exactly what it was like when I was gone. But even when I came back, you were so unhappy. Sometimes you still are.” He reaches up to cup her cheek and she leans into his palm, knowing that he’s talking about her nightmares. They wake her up with tears streaming down her face and the surreal feeling of Oliver’s arms— _how is he here, how is he alive—_ wrapped around her and she’s never felt fear quite like that. “But I came back. I came back for you, and I would do anything— _anything_ —to make you happy, Felicity.”

She wants to kiss him, so she leans forward a little bit until the hand on his chest is holding her up. But she still has another question. “And your split personality problem?”

His eyes strain a little at the corners and he threads a hand through her hair, shrugging with a casualness that belies the war waging within him. “I’m working on it. Is that okay?”

Her expression softens, and she bends down so that their breaths mingle, so that her lips are skimming across his skin. “More than okay,” she whispers before pressing her mouth to his.

x-x-x

Months blend together and slowly, surely, they learn to survive. They grow and heal and their hearts twine together by the fabric of their souls, becoming so inseparable she hardly remembers her life before she met him.

He catches the enemies she identifies for him and she patches him up, bandaging his wounds and kissing his scars until the darkness that radiates from them turns to gleaming light.

They still fight incessantly, though, and Digg and Roy joke that they will bicker until their dying days. Felicity can’t hide her amusement at that, but Oliver gets a stern look on his face whenever anyone mentions the words _Felicity_ and _death_ in the same sentence. She runs a thumb over the crease in his brow and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, telling him not to be so serious all the time.

Serious doesn’t begin to cover it when, one night, she does what she’s never done before and feeds him false information. _Furious_ doesn’t come too close, either.

He’s maneuvering through a building when she discovers that there’s a nifty little explosive tucked right in the center of it, rigged to detonate at any moment and take the structural stability of the building with it. He wants to push through, continue on his mission, and she knows that voice—there will be no convincing him otherwise.

But she’s not going to lose him again. The fear from more than a year ago still stretches thin over her skin like a suffocating plastic wrap, a constant reminder of what life is like without him.

So she lies. She tells him that she’s had time to hack into the database thanks to the bug he planted. She insists that the information they need has been downloaded into the foundry and begs him to _get out_.

He hasn’t jogged fifteen paces away from the building when it explodes into a fiery ball of debris, the jagged pieces raining down onto his back as he throws himself to the ground and covers his head.

When he arrives back at the foundry she’s pacing anxiously. He pulls her to his chest and presses a kiss to her temple, soothing and soft. And then he asks to see the data.

An exploding building has nothing on Oliver Queen when she tells him what she did.

“You _what?”_

Digg and Roy leave the foundry so quickly it’s almost as if they were just shadows to begin with.

“I lied,” she says again, her fingers wringing together. “You weren’t leaving and that bomb was going to explode within moments— _did_ explode within moments, actually.”

“And now the information is gone,” he says flatly, the anger evident in the low notes of his voice.

“Gone,” she confirms, refusing to back down because he’s getting that steely look of his and she _knows_ she’s right. “Probably forever.”

“You don’t get to make those decisions, Felicity,” he growls, unappreciative of her flippant tone.

Her eyebrows rise. “I’m sorry, I don’t get to decide when to save your life?”

“You don’t get to decide to be dishonest with me,” he tells her sharply.

“If you had stayed you would have _died_ , Oliver,” she retorts. “I’m not going to apologize for lying if it means you stay alive. I am _not_ going to lose you again. I’ll lie with every word I say until my last breath if it means you stay alive.”

“Don’t,” he says through gritted teeth, his fists clenching and unclenching. His hood is folded around his neck and his mask and bow lay discarded on the floor in his haste to reach her. “Don’t say that.”

“What, that I’d lie to you? Or that I’d die for you?” She’s almost goading him now; this conversation has gone unsaid for too long. “I would,” she says, taking a step closer to him. “I would die for you without thinking twice. Are you saying you wouldn’t do the same?”

“Of course I would.” His words are a fierce, snap response, as instinctual as breathing air.

She expels a breath slowly as her expression softens because she knows this, knows that he would give up everything for her. Her voice drops back to its normal tone, gentle and affectionate. She closes the space between them and reaches up to cup his jaw with her small hand, her thumb running through his scruff. She watches as the tension starts to leak from his body.

“Why is it so hard for you to accept that I would do for you what you would do for me? That I love you just as much as you love me?”

He closes his eyes at her words, sinking into the feeling of her so close to him. He revels in her presence for the thousandth time and knows, in the very deepest part of his soul, that he wants her—Felicity, his eyes and ears and heart—right here, always.

“Oliver?”

When he opens his eyes again, there’s a glimmer shining through that sends a shiver racing up her spine. It’s sudden and spontaneous and mostly unplanned, but he doesn’t care.

“Marry me,” he says, his voice low and rough and deadly serious.

She withdraws her hand and the warmth of it is replaced with a flush of blood to his cheeks. “What?” The word barely escapes her lips, catching in her throat and on the stammer of her heart.

“I know you would do anything for me,” he tells her, “just like I would do anything for you. Last year, I told you that I could be with you because I would do anything to make you happy. But you…you do so much more than that for me. You don’t just make me feel happy, Felicity. You make me feel _alive_. Even…even when I was about to die, you were there. You’re always there, proving time and time again that I don’t have to be the Arrow or Oliver Queen—I can just be myself. And I’m myself when I’m with you.” He tries to maintain his composure as he reaches up to cradle her face in his hands, watching as the tears gather and tremble in her eyes. “So please, Felicity Smoak, marry me.”

The moment is suspended between them, and as she looks into his eyes she thinks about their mornings, lazy and unhurried, spent sprawled on her bed and tangled into infinite tomorrows. She thinks about their nights, fast-paced and dangerous, spent on the cusp of death with fear flowing in her veins as freely as adrenaline rushes through his.

She thinks—just for a second—about her father, the blue truck that never came back, the man who didn’t love her enough to stay and the girl who couldn’t bring herself to search for someone who didn’t want to be found.

She thinks of the man standing right in front of her, the one who loved her enough to come back—who loves her as easily as he breathes.

Maybe, she thinks, the best things in life don’t need to be found. Maybe, like the sun and her smile and Oliver’s heart, beating strong and true beneath her hand, the best things are the ones that are always there, waiting patiently, despite all odds. And now, with his soul reaching for hers, his touch against her skin and his pulse thrumming against her fingers, Felicity has her answer.

 


End file.
